Copying the previous line to current position in Emacs

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I came across a scenario where I had to quickly copy the previous line in an Emacs buffer to the current position. The usual method for doing this has been to invoke:

C-p C-a C-k C-y RET C-y

Which basically does the following:

Moves to the previous line (C-p)
Moves to the beginning of the previous line (C-a)
Kills the line (i.e., cuts the line with C-k)
Yanks the line back (i.e., restores the original line with C-y)
Creates a newline (RET), and
Yanks another copy of the line with the final C-y (which is what we wanted in the first place)

While this works, it is certainly not the most optimal mechanism to perform such a simple (albeit infrequent) operation.

Elisp on /usr

Copying the previous line to current position in Emacs